By Laura Hipshire
THE ERICKSON TRIBUNE

“We have about 750 feet of track, ten engines, and 50 to 60 cars,” says Tom Harris, who started a model railroad club at Henry Ford Village, in Dearborn, seven years ago.

Among one of the community’s 100-plus different groups a person can join, the model railroad club is a popular choice on campus.

Built to scale
Harris, who moved to the community with his wife Shirley from Grosse Pointe, was interested in model railroads before he moved to Henry Ford Village and had a complete “to-scale” setup at his former house. “I started when I retired,” Harris says. “I wanted to keep busy when golf season ended (mid-October) until February, when I went to Florida.”

Model railroads and toy trains aren’t the same
Harris is quick to point out that there is a distinct difference between model railroads and the toy train sets many of us played with in our youth.

Bill Murphy, a model railroad expert, explains the distinction in his e-zine  article, “Toy Trains vs. Model Trains – What’s the difference?” (www.ezinearticles.com) “For people who aren’t involved in the model railroading hobby, there’s really no difference between ‘toy’ trains and ‘model’ trains. After all, both hobbies involve small trains that are controlled by some sort of power pack. There is a significant difference, however, to anyone who is an enthusiast. Calling a model railroad a ‘toy train’ is like calling a classic piece of literature a ‘novel,’” Murphy says.

“Toy trains are generally marketed to children and are the way many of us were introduced to the hobby. They tend to be quite plain looking and not based on any real-life trains. Model trains, on the other hand, are often a true art form with scale reproductions of real or potential trains and layouts (a technique known as prototyping),” he adds.